Sean Karaman, a freshman at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, hadn’t always paid close attention to his credit card spending. But after taking a personal finance course on campus last fall, he said, he is much more likely to pay as he goes.

“I’ve become best friends with my debit card,” said Mr. Karaman, 21, who plays on the U.N.L.V. hockey team.

More than two-thirds of states require high school students to take a personal finance class before graduation, according to the Council for Economic Education. Now, personal finance courses, offered mostly as electives, are sprouting up at public and private colleges nationwide and getting a boost from a new initiative by Stanford University. While some colleges have long offered personal finance classes, the new effort to develop and promote college-level personal finance instruction carries Stanford’s academic heft.

“There really is a need among all students, and society as a whole, to learn more about personal finance,” said J. Daniel Chi, chairman of the finance department at U.N.LV.’s Lee Business School.

Annamaria Lusardi, an economist and a financial literacy researcher who has directed the Stanford program since 2023, said people today were expected to shoulder more responsibility for their finances than in the past, when jobs came with fixed pensions rather than 401(k) plans that require workers to save and invest their own funds for retirement.

“We have to manage our own money,” Dr. Lusardi said. “It’s too complex, to use common sense and rules of thumb.”